Already, various thinkers about the future have proposed a number of candidates for
the designation "twenty-first-century literacy." That is, what are the key skills
humans must possess in order to be considered literate?
Some writers assume that the definition of literacy will continue to be what it always has
been: "The ability to carefully read and write a contemporary spoken language." Others specify
that the term will apply only to fluency in one or more of the languages spoken by the
largest numbers of people, those certain to be important over the next nine decades of the century;
candidates include Spanish, English, or Mandarin Chinese.

Still others expand the notion of twenty-first-century literacy beyond spoken and written
language to include the panoply of skills often collected under the umbrella term multimedia (being able to both understand and create messages, communications, and works that
include, or are constructed with, visual, aural, and haptic -- that is, physical -- elements as well
as words). Some go on to find important emerging literacy in interactivity and games. And
there are those who say it includes all of the above, and might include other factors as well.

I am one of these last, in that I believe fluency with multiple spoken languages will continue
to be important, and that multimedia, interactivity, and other game-derived devices will be
increasingly significant tools for communicating twenty-first-century thought. Nonetheless, I
firmly believe that the true key literacy of the new century lies outside all these domains.

I believe the single skill that will, above all others, distinguish a literate person is programming
literacy, the ability to make digital technology do whatever, within the possible
one wants it to do -- to bend digital technology
to one's needs, purposes, and will, just as in
the present we bend words and images. Some
call this skill human-machine interaction;
some call it procedural literacy. Others just call
it programming.

Seem strange? I'm sure it does. Today, people
with highly developed skills in this area are
seen as nerds. But consider that as machines
become even more important components of
our communication, our work, our education,
our travel, our homes, and our leisure, the ability
to make them do what we want will become
increasingly valuable. Already, today, a former
programmer in Seattle, one of these very nerds,
is one of the richest people in the world.

So, in a sense, we are going to see as we
progress through the twenty-first century a real
revenge of the nerds, except that the new nerds
will be our programmatically literate children.
As programming becomes more important, it
will leave the back room and become a key skill
and attribute of our top intellectual and social
classes, just as reading and writing did in the
past. Remember, only a few centuries ago, reading
and writing were confined to a small specialist
class whose members we called scribes.

Do You HTML?

One might ask, "Will every educated person
really have to program? Can't the people who
need programming just buy it?" Possibly. Of
course, with that model, we have in a sense
returned to the Middle Ages or ancient Egypt, or
even before. Then, if you needed to communicate
your thoughts on paper, you couldn't do it
yourself. You had to hire a better-educated person --
a scribe -- who knew the writing code.
Then, at the other end, you needed someone to
read or decode it -- unless, of course, you were
"well educated," that is, you had been taught to
read and write and thus had become literate.

Classified Ad:

Electronic Arts, the world’s biggest video game company, recently created this billboard advertisement written in a programming language. Can you read it? (It says, "Now Hiring.")

Credit: Marc Prensky

Here's a key question: Will the need for a
separate scribe tribe of programmers continue
through the twenty-first century, or will the
skill set of an educated person soon include
programming fluency? I think that as programming
becomes increasingly easy (which
it will) and as the need to show rather than
explain becomes important (which it will) and
as people working together want to combine
the results of their efforts and ideas instantaneously
(which they will), educated people
will, out of necessity, become programmers.
Think of it: Your phone and car already require
programming skills; many houses and jobs do,
too. Programming will soon be how we interact
with all our objects, and I believe it will be
an important component of how we interact
with one another as well.

Of course, there are already Luddites who
think a digital machine is most elegant if it has
only one button (like the Roomba robot floor
cleaner) and people who keep searching for a
cell phone that only makes phone calls. (Good
luck.) There is a hierarchy of levels of making
machines do what you want (that is, programming
them) that runs from manipulating a single
on-off switch to managing menus, options,
and customization to coding higher-level programming
languages (Flash, HTML, scripting)
and lower-level languages (C++, Java) to creating
assembler or machine language.

Few people, however, remain satisfied for
long with the first level -- as soon as we master
that, most of us seek refinements and customization
to our own needs and tastes. (The company
that makes the Roomba offers a kit to turn its
parts into whatever type of robot you want.)

Just about every young person programs
(controls his or her own digital technology) to
some extent. Many actions considered merely
tasks -- setting up a universal television remote,
downloading a ringtone, customizing your
mobile phone or desktop -- are really programming.
Doing a Web search is programming, as is
using peer-to-peer or social-networking technologies,
or eBay, or creating a document in
Word, Excel, MySpace, or Facebook -- and toss
in building your avatar in Second Life. Today's
kids are such good programmers that parents
who buy expensive high tech gadgets, such as
camcorders or home theaters, often hand them
to their children to set up (program) for them.

Today, most of this programming takes
place in what I refer to as higher-level programming
languages, consisting of menus and choices
rather than the more flexible computer code.
Of course, many people will be content with
this level of programming (which still manages
to baffle many "literate" adults).

But as today's kids grow up and become
tomorrow's educated adults, most will go much
further. At an early age, many young people
learn the HTML language of Web pages and
often branch out into its more powerful sister
languages, such as XML and PHP. Other kids are
learning programming languages like Game
Maker, Flash, and Scratch, plus scripting language,
graphics tools, and even C++, in order
to build games. They learn them occasionally in
school, but mostly on their own, after school, or
in specialized summer camps. Why? First,
because they realize it gives them the power to
express themselves in the language of their own
times, and second -- and perhaps even more
importantly -- because they find it fun.

Want a Program? Hire a Kid

Suppose you have a need for a computer program.
"Me?" you say. "Why would I have such a
need?" But this possibility is not far-fetched at
all. For instance, when Howard Dean ran for
U.S. president a few years ago, he (or someone
on his staff) had this idea: "What if we could
collect contributions over the Internet?"
Nobody had ever done this before, because the
structure wasn't there -- the program had never
been written. So he went out and found a young
programmer -- an eighteen-year-old -- to write
the necessary code, and within only a matter of
weeks the contributions started pouring in.

Most of us have problems a computer or
another digital machine could easily solve for
us, if only we conceived them as programming
problems: "What is my best commuting route
under different weather or other conditions?"
"What are my statistics in my sports (or hobbies
or work), and how do they compare with those
of others?" "What is the optimal configuration
of my [you name it]?" "How close am I to retirement,
and will I have enough money?"

We all have ideas and needs amenable to
programming solutions. My guess is that the
more educated and literate we are (in the tired
twentieth-century sense), the more of these we
have. Yet most of us "digital immigrants" --
those who came to computers and digital
technology later in our lives -- never even know
it. We never realize that our desire to contact
certain groups of people at certain times, or to
lighten the load of repetitive work (say, grading
papers), or to solve certain types of puzzles
(like Sudoku), are really programming problems,
and quite solvable ones at that.

But some among us do realize this, and we
hire young people -- often our kids, students,
or employees but equally often consultants
selling solutions -- to do the necessary programming
for us. One result is that we nonprogrammers
often get ripped off (charged a lot
for something quite simple), say, by financial
planners offering seemingly sophisticated
tools that, were we the slightest bit "literate,"
we could not only write ourselves but also customize
specifically to our needs.

That's not how it will be in the future. As we
move further into the twenty-first century, well educated
people who have needs and ideas
addressable via programming will increasingly
be able to recognize this fact and take matters
into their own hands.

The Digital "Scribe Tribe"

Recently, programming languages "ordinary"
people use have begun to emerge. Of these, one
in particular -- Flash, from Adobe -- appears to
be becoming a de facto standard. A great many
kids in elementary school and the middle
grades around the world are learning to program
in Flash and are continually improving
their skills as they advance through the grades.
They use this tool and others like it (the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
Scratch, for example) to communicate a wide
range of information and emotion -- from stories
to logic to games to ideas to persuasive
arguments to works of art -- all through programming.
And it seems to them not nerdy but,
rather, sophisticated and advanced.

The young people who do this vary greatly,
of course, in the sophistication of what they
can do. But sophisticated programming is
becoming easier by the day. More and more
premade programming objects -- code written
by others that can simply be plugged in to
perform certain tasks -- are available on the
Internet, and are mostly free.

These databases of premade parts greatly
enhance students' abilities, extend their programming
and problem-solving capabilities,
and shorten the time to get things done. In a
sense, these bits of code are like an alphabet of
programming. Recently, a friend was asked to
program a "Wheel of Fortune" in Flash. Rather
than taking a week to program it from scratch,
he did a Web search, found something like what
he wanted available free, and finished the project
in an hour.

With these increasingly available and findable
pieces of code, the range of what one can
do and communicate with programming can
expand indefinitely. And though simpler programs
such as Flash already allow a pretty good
degree of sophistication, many young people,
through game creation, Internet-tool creation,
or other means, get into the more sophisticated
programming languages of three-dimensional world building, scripting, and entirely abstract,
logical programming languages such as Java
and C++.

And so emerges the new scribe tribe of programmers,
reaching into (and eventually
becoming) the intellectual elite of the twenty-first
century. Programming has already become
a tool today's young people use to communicate
with one another via such components as
machinima (see the definition below), ringtones,
emoticons, searches, photo manipulation,
and games. Young people email or IM their
creations to one another as we do our Word and
Excel attachments, often posting them on the
Internet for all to see. I bet few among us have
not been the recent recipient of an emailed URL
pointing us to an interesting program, a greeting
card, a YouTube video, a machinima, or a
game. (And, of course, Word and Excel are programming
languages in themselves, with enormously
sophisticated programming capabilities
built in via macros and scripting.)

Flash: A program that lets users create vector-based animation

Machinima: "Machine cinema," in which simple tools found in video games are put to unexpected ends

Scratch: An easy-to-use programming language developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

As the century goes on, those who don't
program -- who can't bend their increasingly
sophisticated computers, machines, cars, and
homes to their wills and needs -- will, I predict,
be increasingly left behind. Parents and teachers
often disrespect today's young people for
being less than literate in the old reading-and-writing
sense. But in turn, these young citizens
of the future have no respect for adults who
can't program a DVD player, a mobile phone, a
computer, or anything else. Today's kids already
see their parents and teachers as the illiterate
ones. No wonder some teachers are scared to
bring new technologies into the classroom --
the kids just laugh at their illiteracy.

So, as the highly literate person of 2008
might start off the day reading the New York
Times and firing off a cleverly worded letter to
the editor in response to a column, the highly
literate person of 2028 may start the day ingesting
the news in multiple ways with various
types of stories they have programmed to be
delivered in a preferred order, each at a preferred
speed. And if that person feels a need to
express an opinion, a simple bit of programming
will allow him or her to determine all the
people in the world to whom a response should
go, and have it customized for each of them. Or
one might program and fire off a video, an animation,
or a simulation.

As the highly literate adult of today might
pen a witty birthday card note for a young niece
or nephew, the highly literate adult of tomorrow
might program the child a game. And
though today's highly literate person may enjoy
a sophisticated novel or nonfiction book on a
plane or train ride, tomorrow's highly literate
person may prefer to change, by programming,
whatever story or other media he or she is interacting
with to suit individual preferences, and
might then, with a little more programming,
distribute those changes to the world.

And, of course, all this extends into the physical
world as well thorough robotics and
machine programming.

Tool Time

Tools have always been important to humans;
now, intellectual tools are becoming increasingly
significant. Until recently, getting an education
and becoming a literate person meant
learning to use the set of tools considered essential
for each field or discipline. The tools in any
endeavor change and improve over time, but
they generally do so quite slowly, and new tools
are often invented not by ordinary people but
by "geniuses." Getting an education in a field
has long meant gaining mastery of its
existing tools.

In this century, we will see, I think, something
quite different. Using their ever more
sophisticated programming skills, ordinary
well-educated people will be constantly inventing
new tools to solve whatever problems they
have. In fact, this will be the expectation of
what a literate person does. Already, in many
circles (and not only scientific ones, although
most are still rather geeky), one often hears
someone say, "I wrote a little program to do
that." And whether it's to find Manhattan
addresses or to keep track of how many seconds
remain until your next paycheck, a typical reaction
is, "Can I get that?" to which the answer is
as simple as a URL or a USB key.

It takes neither geeks nor armies of people
to create useful tools via programming. A
woman recently created an extremely useful
program to compile and redeem her supermarket
coupons. Google was created by two
graduate students (Sergey Brin and Larry
Page). Just one guy (Pierre Omidyar) developed
the original program for eBay. Often,
from these initial programming ideas come
very big companies and profits. (Brin, Page,
and Omidyar are all billionaires.)

But even if they don't yield huge profits,
thousands -- and soon millions -- of people are
beginning to create and share good programs
we can all use free. Successful companies train
new programmers, who then generate their
own ideas and tools, in addition to the tools
their companies build. Smart businesses are
already searching for young people who can
create these new tools -- employees who are
twenty-first-century literate.

All of which brings us to an important question:
If programming (the ability to control
machines) is indeed the key literacy of this century,
how do we, as educators, make our students
literate? This problem is a particularly
thorny one, because most teachers, even many
of our best math and science instructors, do not
possess the necessary skills, even rudimentary
ones. Most of the tools (and even the concept of
programming) were developed long after these
teachers were born or schooled.

Can we do it by bringing working programmers
into the schools? Not likely. Most of the
good ones are busy programming and have no
desire to teach.

The answer is not yet clear, but we can either
come up with creative solutions to this real
problem, or, in their absence, the kids will, as
they are doing with so many things, figure out
ways to teach themselves. Imagine: Literacy
without (official) teachers.

Our machines are expected, thirty years
from now, to be a billion times more powerful
than they are today. Literacy will belong to those
who can master not words, or even multimedia,
but a variety of powerful, expressive human-machine
interactions. If you are from the old
school, you may not enjoy hearing this, but I
doubt there is anything anyone can do to stop it.

Thirty years from now, will the United States
be more competitive with a population that can
read English at a tenth-grade level or with a
population excellent at making the complex
machines of that era do their bidding? The two
options may be mutually exclusive, and the
right choice may determine our children's place
in the world's intellectual hierarchy.

Marc Prensky is the author of Digital Game-Based Learning and Don't Bother Me, Mom,
I'm Learning. He is also founder and CEO of
Games2train, a game-based learning company.

Programming is very important in the world we live today since most technology is connected to programming. It is a useful attribute to have in the world but it's not for everyone. There aren't many who enjoy programming because it can be long and tedious. Also it isn't used as often as a spoken language would be used and isn't as necessary.

I find that the new Concept of programming to be an incredible feat for many of us new educators and conquerors.

When I first began my conquest of Europe, I was having trouble with doing my tax return. After I learned rudimentary programming, sweeping aside Central European Empires was simple and Easy.

To quote the article

"The tools in any endeavor change and improve over time, but they generally do so quite slowly, and new tools are often invented not by ordinary people but by "geniuses." Getting an education in a field has long meant gaining mastery of its existing tools."

This is very true. I feel like I've invented a ton of New Tools now that I've learn more about programming. These include the French Column formation, the Bicorne, and French Imperialism that didn't surrender at the drop of a hat. Beating Wellington was simple once I could effectively program in JAVA.

I agree with the author of the article that the future of our planet relies on man's relationship with machines. If we insist that our future is dependent on machines' ability to perform tasks, young people should invest the majority of their education in the programming field, even if they decide not to follow up on programming as a career.

This article extensively described what the future of today's youth looks like. Everything around us is based on one program or another. I agree with James Edmund Long I by saying that the average person has to keep up with the technological advances of today's advanced and modern society. Today, you basically can't live without a computer system in your own home.

I strongly believe that knowledge of computers and the machine language will quickly become the standard for all people to know how to read and write. Because literacy is "The ability to carefully read and write a contemporary spoken language," it can easily be concidered the new level of human language. Almost every single piece of information, documentaion, or even entertainment is in some way, shape, or form integrated into computers. The United States even has entire divisions dedicated to the knowledge of computers and their understanding. In today's society computer based jobs are in high demand and with a good understanding of how to navigate them, one could make a very solid and stabble career for his or herself at a company such as EA Games. Today more and more thing are being solely by computers and he younger generation arebeing exposed to it just as quickly. Having a cell phone or a facebook at age 10 may have been seen as a little odd a few years ago but today that is rapidly becoming a norm of society. Ultimately, I believe that computers will only continue to grow in popularity as technology advances and people will either have to know or will basically becoming out of date software themselves.